ABSTRACT
Statistics can hardly be invoked to show that democracies have been less often involved in war than autocracies. Liberal states are as aggressive and war prone as any other form of government or society in their relations with nonliberal states. As the empirical evidence grew that democracies are just as warlike as other states, even if in a somewhat perplexing way, the idea arose that, nevertheless, there may be characteristics associated with democracies that tend to discourage war. In democracies people ordinarily have the most freedom, under totalitarian regimes the least. The chapter informs that when the Democratic/Foreign Violence Proposition is defined in terms of the severity of violence, instead of frequencies, we get a perfect negative relationship between the degree of democracy and the number of people for a regime killed in international wars or violence. It looks at the studies that are most often cited as showing that democracies are as warlike as other regimes.
